On the evolution of An Aura. From shimmering biology effervessence to object fetishes. To artists and art to the powers of super heroes and super heroines. And to our own multiplying-like-rabbits doors of perception. This week, everyone was talking about Aura, from the art and language of contemporary art at the recent Armory, Scope and Volta shows to the Rubin Museum’s Brainwave in New York City exploring what ecstasy smells like.
Aura, because the artist is there pulsating and making us drool before the offering. Aura, because it captures unseen being and becoming…the Past or Future Major. Aura because it is study in portraiture via the senses whether the components are scent molocules, digital pixels and in situ transmission of art and its “Aura.” Aura as it happens and you are there.
Womb with a View: Giants, Google maps and Migraine Fortress Visions.
Way pre-google maps, when I was way smaller than I am now, I was captivated by the ending of a cartoon show hosted by a Giant, who was only seen via his hands. After all the cartoons ran, his Giant hand fingers lovingly nudged tiny chairs, rockers and puffy chairs back into place around a cozy fireplace, since, one assumed, the invisible and excitable tiny kids messed them all up watching the cartoons. Ever since then, miniature people and miniature household items hold a special fascination for me. I so fetish-eyes them, they are all over my house feeding my Giant ego:-)
Feel big and then the even bigger universe on Little-people.blogspot.com, by Slinkachu. It has long been a favorite, you can easily wile away at least 20 minutes peeping his series of wee folks left on the street to fend for themselves and their own devices. Their adventures in the Big World, which gets bigger with every step back of the Giant photographer, are amusing, sweet and pathetic. (see? a better prettier world view than morning papers, same conclusions…)
“…left in London to fend for themselves” is the artist’s Giant drop and run tactic.
The scope of our worlds changing in a moment is the promise of art, the senses, drugs and religion among other things. Having experienced in one week both the shows of the latest in contemporary art and a profound discourse on the world of scent, plus a never-before experience of a spontaneous mind-bending, headache-less, ocular migraine, shared with the likes of Leonardo d Vinci, Georges de Chirico and Lewis Carroll, with its glowing and growing rainbow laser light triangular “fortifications,” “fortress” and “Auras” which supplant normal vision…I can indeed say my scope of the world has been altered.
As Modern Citizens, we traipse from sensation to sensation, biological to digital to aura-bending experiences, readiness to the moment is the only anchor and answer. These are the Artists of Aura who made me slow down this week.
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Thomas Doyle‘s little people at Witzenhausen Gallery are frozen in their landscapes via bell jars of memory for our meditation.
“I studied painting and printmaking, but ended up feeling limited by those media. After time, I realized I should just be making what made me the happiest, and I started the miniature work. I often say that if the nine-year-old me traveled forward to meet the current me, he’d probably give me a huge high five – and maybe demand to stay.”
From a tiny inner spark of universal memory, it’s either our google-enabled future Giant vision or our nostalgic busy-box brains looking for a “force-me-to-slow-down” primal need in which a play on scale offers solace and perspective to our sometimes sodden bodily reference points. The visual patterning of macro cosmic painterly aerial views of civilization may reorganize our cellular makeup, the way the view from a plane in the air reminds us that rivers are like our veins, towns are like our computer brains and mountains and the earth is our body.
The comfort of encylopedic style imagery and a nostalgic trend for childrens books that began with Todd Oldham‘s ode to 1960’s and 70’s illustrator, Charley Harper, was all over the art shows. Whatever it is, the delight is worth the price of admission that yes, we are tiny creatures in a very big world. It is thankfully not all about us.
Floor to ceiling canvases dry brushed painted with tiny towns and encyclopedic details and goings on in Christopher Daniels paintings at Number 35 Gallery were hardly visible for the packed crowds around them. Naive, calming, intriguing, you can feel that people are compelled to play Giant as the world perspective is demanding our continued shift from egocentric focus to community and connection, whether held up microscopically, through a telescope or a google map.
Another street artist I have followed, Jan Vormann, fills in the spaces of decay at once with earnest Lego block cheery hope. The mind hops between synapses at these legos in buildings where it all began in Berlin, and now in New York City. This nostalgia for toys, figurines, comic book figures and language and play was everywhere. There was not so much of this at the Whitney Biennial uptown, draw your own conclusions. These tiny kids and kid games may be a scaling back from Murakami and Koons’ big comic bravado and now in our more introspective times, random street art and tiny meditations on toys fit our back-to-the-beginning urges.
Yet Another Lichtenstein Comic.
It’s the juxtapostion people! The debate, such as on deezen.com, about these Jessica Lichtenstein at Gallery Nine 5, figures rages on in the blogspace about the source, the usage and intent. Probably the same fire around Warhol soup can or Picasso and his steal from Africa or even Lichtenstein’s comics? Murakami did it better? The gesture, emotion and fluids of anime charactors whose power is super human is more his statement, Lichenstein’s women are more self-posessed or beseeching the viewer as objects in an earthy and fully doll way, with none of the Aura of Anime as much as they are hipper Barbie dolls contemplating themselves and their plastic beauty.
Yet More Plastic Fetish Flowing.
The opposite of humans pumping themselves with plastic and botox for altercation into Barbie and Ken dolls, in Nick Ervinck‘s work…here the Plastic seeks and meets biology and air. The only thing exhibited by Antwerp’s Koraalberg Gallery at Volta was a film moving like fluid fast through yellow amporphic cell structures, an experience like the birth canal movies I remember seeing at about age 13. The largesse of Nick’s gestures reminded me of the volume and Aura of Alber Elbaz of Lanvin’s billowing tunics as they floated the models on the Paris runway.
Daughter-types for Dauguerreotypes, Lampshades for Hats and Wigs for Handbags.
Subject and Object collide when gallery guests end up as the art. At Volta, Heather Cantrell of Kinkhead, sat surrounded by a jungle of plastic and live plants and a flurry of photo gear fumbling with her Poloroid camera and I scrambled over to sit with her. And that is exactly her art. Portrait sittings impromtu for $200. Large scale Poloroids 7 feet by 10. A Study in Portraiture was Heather’s documentation of the documenters, capturing personalities from London’s art world as subjects. This impromptu art-on-site at the Volta show, with artists on site exhibiting, made for very exciting palpitations.
Put Large Lampshade on head for Fun and Enlightenment.
Tronie Portraits of The Daughter. Hendrik Kerstens at Witzenhausen Gallery of NYC and Amsterdam showed Paula Pictures, a modern girl rendered timeless by light and a technique of Dutch portrait painters of the 17th century (called tronies) and removed from context by the non-identifiable “clothing and hats” attached to her by her father, Hendrik. From the gallery: “Kerstens is conscious of the fact that people are the same, no matter who they are or what age they live in. Any association with a certain age is determined by the way we are depicted: the clothes and make up we wear, accessories and lighting.” Thus the Aura of a modern girl references and the destruction of references and adding on the Aura of a timeless day.
Outre Aura-Worldly shots of In Crowd.
Station Independent Projects at Scope presented Sway, a photographic collection of how individuals influence each other with their behavior, dress and culture. Curator, Leah Oates chose a diverse selection and the photos by Miles Ladin, a society, celeb and events photographer who has shot for Harper’s Bazaar, Fortune, Vibe, Der Spiegel, Morgunbladid, W, The New York TImes Style section and Tatler. They struck me the most for their unintended candids, what do we remember about the faces in our midst, especially the Aura of The Famous?
Racial and Sexual Profiling.
Begin with Dr. Suess’s mash-ups of biology and throw in mixed gender, orifices and racial facials staring blankly. Keep staring and Lewis Carroll’s satiric wit and social farce pushes through primal history with a goofy simple innocence, like Harold and his purple crayon. Boris Hoppek, with Helium Cowboy, spray paints, lassos latex on lasses and appliques fake fur genitals on real people for portraits while his Basic Bimbo appears in all sizes on streets, galleries, in boats en masse and videos. When a face looks like a light socket, you just have to love it.
It feels like finding an old Disney cartoon from 1930 that is eerily familiar and disturbing and funny, depending which point on a time and space line and what Aura mantle you put yourself in as viewer. And although his work around women’s bodies and sex are the most amusing, it says something of our culture that race is OK to dialogue about and portray, if tentatively, but women’s bodies may still be taboo beyond basic fetishizing. (For the weak of heart or easily excited, I’ve opted to include the “taboo.” )
…and thankfully the discourse and portrayal in the art world is getting more non-white and non-male everyday.
The Eyes of Deana Lawson.
The reviews say she plays with the “sacred and profane” two other words I heard much of these past few weeks. I believe I am a bit tired of these words being held up as opposites. This is a photographer who spends much time with her subjects until the relationship deepens and it shows in the images. It is just sacred. Deana’s work was shown as part of Station Independent Projects and you can see more of Deana and the other photographers from Sway here on artmostfierce.blogspot.com.
Deana is much like performance artist, Kalup Linzy, who stages soap operas twisting voice and character plays, distorting speed up or down through voices and tempo or blandness to make the viewer question reality. Both untether us from convention or even the madcap pace of our lives and perversions.
Mass Fetish.
“Fetishizing the object is mistake and at the same time, mass production on the net is an aura annililator.” says Holly Block, Director of Bronx Museum, “There is a whole segment of the population that has no access to technology.” She spoke about projecting video on the face of the museum and that museums should be free. Where is the reflection opening for kids not exposed to the possibility of that transcendence language? Exactly where it is, in the mass culture itself.
At Scope, Anonymous gallery featured Kostas Seremetis, a fetishizer and mash-up machine of of pulp iconography. My favorite piece of his is “Trilogy” film, taking the left third of Star Wars, the middle third of Empire Strikes Back and the right third of Return of the Jedi, synchronizing moments and not.
Skylar Fein‘s turn table on cultural ephemera and slogans at Jonathan Ferrara Gallery were a tour de force, complete with Manifesto literature and two major pieces, Gun Rack and Black Flag (Marcuse), which were purchased by major private collections for $20,000 and $40,000 respectively, according to Volta’s press release. Not bad for collecting stray wood around New Orleans and making new signs of the old, some of which hawked bargain deals all for under $10.
Sacred Public Space
Nato Thompson, Chief Curator of Creative Time which conducts art in the public realm, declares, “Public space has gone from profane to sacred. Spatial experiences are more novel due to the amount of time we spend in virtual space.”
The videos in the elevators at Volta by Trong Gia Nguyen of Humanitarians Not Heroes, were a novel profane place to show art. I once heard that the funny nervous and uncomfortable atmosphere in elevators comes from too many auras crammed into a small space. I couldn’t focus on the videos at the time due to this Aura blending effect but truly enjoyed later at home. Perhaps better in a bathroom, I know the ladies room is always serious sacred space, especially in front of the mirror. Talk about art most fierce…
At a Volta panel called “Framing Art in The 21st Century,” Art Heads pondered digitization, market shifts, how and where visual art will be disseminated, sold, and exhibited in the coming decades. With Nato, Holly, Amy Cappellazzo (Int’l Co-Head of Postwar and Contemporary Art,Christie’s), Manon Slome, Founder and Curator of No Longer Empty, which exhibits art in vacant space, Sara Reisman, Director, Percent for Art, and Dan Cameron, Founder and Curator of the New Orleans Biennial Prospect, the gospel and testaments to art in the public realm and out of the museums were let loose.
Moderated by art market journalist, Lindsay Pollack, all agreed that decentralized centers of art, the dissolving of hierarchy in collecting and critique and public accessibility are the democratization of art and my favorite conclusion was: “Art defines what public space is.”
I would also add my gospel that shared new sensory art has enormous power to change the Aura of the Planet.
To Wit: Precious Encounters of The New Temporal and Olfactory Kind.
Tino Sehgal stages temporary public interactives in museums and is a brilliant Luddite with a gospel of no cell phone, no airplanes and no paper legal contracts or documentation in the selling of his work. He’s got the Marian Goodman Gallery, New York Times reviews, shows in the Guggenheim and his pieces sell for millions. What a Luddite.
“For the last two to three hundred years in human society, we have been very focused on the earth. We have been transforming the materials of the earth, and the museum has developed as a temple of objects made from the earth. I’m the guy who comes in and says: ‘I’m bored with that. I don’t think it’s that interesting, and its not sustainable.’ Inside this temple of objects, I re-focus attention to human relations.”
Amy Cappellazzo at Christie’s is lit up by this idea. Just a digital piece with enormous value is intriguing. She’d like to see a million people pay $1 to own a piece of art versus one piece going to one collector for a million dollars. The world of precious object or experience with Aura plus the repeated Aura of digital experience is a full spectrum.
Even much more radical and potentially ecstatic than a digital revolution of art is the Scent Revolution offered by perfumer Christophe Laudamiel and Neurobiologist, Stuart Firestein, who together with an audience doused in scent strips, attempted to touch the mystery of the smell of ecstasy at Brainwave at Rubin Museum of Art. I was invited by the sensitive, vibrant and inquisitive expert at the pioneer of scent auras, Lucy Raubertas of the beautifully intriguing blog, Indie Perfumes.
Christophe Laudamiel is the creator of last year’s Green Aria, a scent opera at the Guggenheim using scent as a composer utilizes notes, a painter uses color or an architect uses building materials. Christophe created for Thierry Mugler Le Parfum Coffret, the suite of perfumes for the movie based on Patrick Süskind’s Book Perfume. Paris 1738 is the “signature scent” complete with the Aura of Paris at that time…full of fetid decay, decomposition, musty, and animal like the streets. I actually liked it.
Why is the frontier of scent so alluring and ripe for art-making? Although smells can affect us and feel drug-like, the difference is that we smell and then can analyze and decide, our smelling sense and resulting actions are not like a drug where our powers of reasoning are altered. What we see sold in stores as perfume is only thirty-percent of what can be done with scent. Fascinating that not much research is available and yet we know that scent is actually molocules consumed by the body versus waves of color and light or vibrations like music and there are hundreds of scent brain receptors versus the handful for visual or aural stimulants. Olfactory stem cells are the only nuerons that replicate into a new set of nuerons every day (a robust phenom) and information is delivered quicker to the inner brain than ocular synapses.
It is no surprise that there is actually a Buddha dedicated to the sense of smell in the direction of the South, an important sense to have in one’s ecstasy quest toolbox towards enlightenment beyond form. If art is meant to bring us together, it also carries the spiritual quest to bring us higher by it’s snarky invitation to love it but be unattached at the same time. The temporality and permanence through memory and time of Scent is a smart and intriguing ingredient and I hope to smell more of it in art.
Mathius Kessler‘s Nowhere To Be Found human skull with live coral growing on it at Volta was perhaps the best art statement, quickly dispensing of art labels and chatterings such as “Aura,” “Sacred” and “Profane.” Since my own father’s recent passing, a particular gorgeous scent comes to me in moments of truth, one I have never smelled before in my life. I know this is a communication from worlds beyond what my profane (?) brain can currently comprehend and yet it is a most precious Art of Communication, spurring me on to expand my Aura into Non-linear Love and a World ever expanding.
Visionary Migraine indeed. Buddhist quest of non-attachment indeed.
Thankfully… All is Full of Love and The One Aura…Unavoidable.
“Love as the primary and fundamental cosmic fact. … I was this fact; or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that this fact occupied the place where I had been.” Aldous Huxley, Doors of Perception
(note: Bjork video is on permanent exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.)
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Tags: [icasso, a study in portraiture, aldous huxley, all is full of love, amy cappellazzo, anonymous gallery, Armory show, artmostfierce, aura, bjork, boris hoppek, bronx museum, charlie harper, children's book illustrations, christopher daniels, creative time, dan cameron, deana lawson, doors of perception, framing art in the 21st century, Gallery Nine 5, georges de chirico, Giants, heather cantrell, helium cowboy, hendrik kerstens, Holly Block, jade dressler, jan vormann, jessica lichtenstein, jonathan ferrara gallery, kalup linzy, koraalberg gallery, kostas seremetis, Lanvin dress, leah oates, legos art, leonardo da vinci, lewis carroll, lindsay pollack, little people blogspot, Lucy Raubertas, manon slome, marian goodman, mathias kessler, Migraine, migraine visions, miles ladin, murakami figures, nato thompson, new orleans biennial, nick ervinck, no longer empty, Number 35 Gallery, ocular migraine, paula pictures, prospect, roy lichtenstein, Rubin Museum, Rubin Museum Brainwave, sara reisman, Scope art show, skylar fein, slinkachu, station independent projects, sway, thomas doyle, tino sehgal, todd oldham, trong gia nguyen, tronie portrait, Volta art show, warhol, Whitney Biennial, witsenhausen
“Wan.” says a bored Blake Gopnik. “Fun.” enthuses Kelly Crow. “Budget.” proclaims Holland Cotter. “Looks more like us than we care to admit.” politics David Weiner. “…a giant burst of happiness for the infinite creativity of America.” gushes Jerry Saltz.
“Shopping in the “Ambienelle.” intones a fashionable Todd Eberle. “When will there be a Shaquille O’iennial?” quips a commenter on a blog.
“Are We There Yet?”, asks and answers Elena Brower.
“I Proclaim!” The Whitney Biennial is consistent for the response of “Let’s Always Be Critical of It” and yet it in the end it proclaims the state of contemporary art emphatically anyway. Although I have been more excited by past Biennials with art and conclusions from my own proclivities, for example, “Handmade Everything!” “Visionary Drawing!” “We’re Morphing into Animals, Animals are us!”…I aimed for a decidely 2010 experience of the exhibition in honor of the title and orientation: the democratic Friday night “Pay What You Wish” line at The Whitney.
Waiting. The March night sky is light at 5:30 pm, the air carries a crisp spring anticipation of sweetness and sound. We chat on the line with strangers before and after us, getting to know each other briefly. In the courtyard below a wooden box structure is moaning like Tibetan monks. I am stamping my Jimmy Choos in anticipation like horse hooves as it still cold.
The first and second floors were a “seen it before” tapas plate featuring war and pretension and loud “theatre” voices, studies in cacophony or a serving up of our mindless cultural fare. I was impatient and bored. The much-talked about Nina Berman photographs of a dismembered and disfigured war veteran registered a strong sensation but we have all endured this kind of visual shock and then we walk over to the next piece, like shopping. I recalled the recent Virginia Heffernan New York Times article on the sound in movies celebrating a new level of films that “revisit and rethink the sounds of breath and breathlessness.” It is this kind of outer experience and inner penetration of art and sensation I am seeking.
Home.
Stimulus-saturation and art puffery made me choose not to stand and watch the movie on the screen of the most touted piece in the show. I knew without reading any reviews before I went that this was “the piece”, whether from the energy of the room or the “art show” quality of The Bruce High Quality Foundation‘s “We Like America and America Likes Us.” A Ghostbusters white ambulance with mesmerizing TV, film and online visual edits projected on the windshield sat in a dark room emitting light and sound like Oz. The installation was influenced by Joseph Beuys’ 1974 Action piece in which the artist/shaman went from plane to ambulance to a gallery space, where, swathed in grey felt, he spent 3 days with a coyote. His feet never touched the ground and returned to the airport, he jetted to Europe.
Michael Jackson photographs paired with Charles Baudelaire lined the walls and all I could feel was a desire to cover the whole room with gobs of grey felt for a stronger statement about art and feeling. My favorite take-away was actually a small girl, in a tartan dress and apron standing in the headlight of the ambulance like lawn sculpture while the crowd transfixed stood around the room helpless and searching for meaning with “art-stare” eyes.
Later at home, I watched the video.
My “impatient American” choice to experience this video alone instead of a gallery, was so reflective of the subject and identity of the piece. In the film, America is portrayed as a witness, a lover, a participant and an intimate friend or family member with changing age, gender or race addressed by a smug, self-absorbed, TV commercial-like woman’s voice. After watching this mesmerizing collective history, like the film of one’s monkey mind before it slags with a light bulb pop onto the meditative state, I was silent. I looked at my notes. Like a transfixed therapy patient, I had written down three phrases, which perfectly encapsulated my childhood experience brought into my adult ego consciousness that I had never paired before. The effect was stunning and life-shifting.
Our synthesis of individual and collective experience is at the crossroads and as this piece, and so many reviews of the show, ends with a question of “Waiting?” This may be “The Message” of the Biennial as seen by its curators. That I brought the show home with me and realized we were sleeping together and sharing neurons is the satisfaction we seek. The job of the artists and curators is complete. Although I paid the budget fare, I was a satisfied consumer of American art and culture. Thank you, Whitney.
…and so I moved on.
The third floor elevator opens to the literal gasp of Pae White‘s 40 foot tapestry of smoke and it is thankfully, one of the show’s most visceral moments. From the corner of your eye you can see a video of men in a vast gym performing rote 19th century German chastity exercises on mat islands. As a counterpoint that speaks of the robotic self undoing of smoking and our mice-like obedience to life productivity missives contrasted with the sexy smoke snarl like a snake to a flute, Jesse Aron Green‘s video “Arztliche Zimmergymnastik,” reminded me of the show’s playful spirit that will always engender a lively debate.
Watership Down Utopia.
My notes are simple and wishful as artist Roland Flexner‘s methods. “Movements within a plane. Sumi ink paper. Ink, breath.” The wall cards said this about us as potential human viewers on these Avatarish landscapes, that we have a “…tendency to project landscapes from ambiguity.” The black and white scenarios are reminiscent of 1930’s mystical stage and screen sets which feels strangely appropriate for today’s mood. The tool of breath upon the work feels like the ambiguous lover and creator America in the Bruce High Quality Foundation piece. This watcher pose of much of the art, is the waiting, and like a wizened old Guru staring back at a seeker’s gaze, the answer is the question.
Charles Ray‘s ink flowers were made in his spare time like doodles. The curators filled a whole room with these simple and naive repetitive obsessions reminding me of flowers I drew on my school notebooks in the 70’s. Like bland but hopeful smile faces it is served up like a remedy, no artistic distance, perspective or contemplation other than itself, like a Rothko, but more frustrating for our evolved complexities and expectations. However…ok…this is a happiness pill I can swallow and a powerful statement in the end. Thank you, Whitney.
The Box Lunch thankfully, comes with Video.
Video is always my favorite part of the Biennial. Kate Gilmore‘s “Standing Here” opens with a view into a box and for its prescence and metaphor speaks to the macho-heavy Whitney’s first real significant inclusion of women artists. (It is 2010 after all and the 75th anniversary of the show, so thank you Whitney.) The red polka dot dress is the first shot of color infiltrating the box, shoes follow kicking the way outside-in thru a four foot enclosure seen from above, its scale unknown until she begins breaking through. On the Whitney’s site, the video experience began with the exciting peek into Kate’s World, as she explains the piece on a shopping excursion for shoes to wear during the piece, only to end on a dropped note, with a pair she likes to wear everyday and a standing on line…waiting…as if the filmmakers ran out of funds. See the video here and tell me if this is an artistic statement or…?
Rashaad Newsome‘s video of solitary Voguers silently posturing and popping in a similar all white room just opposite Kate Gilmore, affectedly anesthetizes a vibrant art. The commentary says this effect, without music or sound, is to equalize the art with contemporary dance forms. OK, thank you, because dance has borrowed from this art before Michael Jackson, but without music, for me it is 10,000 times removed. Both videos easily metaphors for the pervasive culture that boxes both in, keeps the appropriators in and understanding out.
Invited into the room-size box created by Edgar Cleijne and Ellen Gallagher promising an immersive video and environment, lured mostly by the text about a Sun Ra and Kennedy connection, I suddenly was back on floor two, feeling hoaxed by hodge podge art for art’s sake. The craftiness of the message had no humor which only came off pretentious to me like a 1980’s hedge fund lifestyle. The description on the wall said it was “visual poem” which I had read as “visual porn” and maybe my hopes were too high, but this was not even a a good 80’s redux, it was just ridic.
So I went back to the box where it began to get another look…this time from the inside…of Theaster Gates‘ “Monastic Residency” piece in the courtyard overlooked by the temporary cafe. A simple stage set which will host artists, historians and street musicians during the course of the show and showing the hand of the makers, it felt much more 2010.
I opted for barbacue chips in the pop-up cafe, “Sandwiched”, pretending I had a hidden camera focused on the emphatic mouth and conversational arm movements of the patrons of a Friday night in an art cafe which amused us more than anything I had seen in the actual show. There was not much “delight” or “humor” in this show contrary to other years, which is a shame as humor can enlighten much more than earnest artist statements that end up being “wan” or leaving one “waiting.” However, with a very full performance schedule, the show invites return and re-experiencing, a smart engagement for the 75th anniversary. Jeffrey Inaba’s architecture collective INABA and C-Lab designed the cafe space with huge and funny lanterns, a bold comment on quick bites and our search for big illumination that summed up the show for me.
Popped out onto the sidewalk exiting, there was still a long line and a masked girl with layered sweaters and frocks blessing glittery gold rocks in her hands which she had lined up to spell the word “C R E A T I V I T Y” on the sidewalk, while the night air still had a young feel and the crowd waiting to get in went around the block.
As I made bold and suddenly cold steps to walk up Madison Avenue towards my home, I thought of my yoga teacher, Elena’s Brower’s message of “Home” and how it will always be the answer to end our “Waiting” for something outside of ourselves to offer transcendance or expansion or a message.
“The only definite is that expansion is always occurring. Gratitude is the most expansive attitude we can claim: when we are thankful, we invite levity, more space, more abundance. With thankfulness, we imprint receptivity on our bodies- we can take in more. With every incident of focused gratitude, we return home to our expanding hearts.” Elena Brower
With gratitude to the curators, guest curator Francesco Bonami and co-curator Gary Carrion-Murayari, for they encapsulated a paired down, watered down, back-to-basics, climbing out of boxes and hopeful Spring, a year and some after Obama and the most challenged year many of us ever had.
“We need not find our way back home to our divine beginnings; we need only appreciate that wherever we wander in Consciousness we are already where we need to be in order to be fulfilled.” Dr. Douglas Brooks
Tell that to reviewers, America’s lovers and the spirit of a culture that relishes art and freedom. This is Home.
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Tags: 2010 art highlights, 2010 new art, 2010 Whitney Biennial, Armory, art in NYC, best new art in 2010, Biennial, Biennial reviews, Blake Gopnik, Bruce High Quality Foundation, Central Park Coyote, Charles Ray, contemporary art, coyote, coyote symbolism, David Weiner, Dr. Douglas Brooks, Edgar Cleijne and Ellen Gallagher, Elena Brower, highlights of nyc art 2010, Holland Cotter, INABA and C-Lab, jade dressler, Jeffrey Inaba, Jerry Saltz, Jesse Aron Green, Joseph Beuys, Kate Gilmore, Kelly Crow, man meets coyote, new art in NYC, New York art, Nina Berman, NY contemporary art, Raashad Newsome, Roland Flexner, Sandwiched, shaman, Spring art in NYC, The Whitney Biennial, The Whitney Museum, Theaster Gates, Todd Eberle, Virginia Heffernan, We Like America and America Likes Us, Whitney Biennial
My father was my Heyoka. Amidst my chaotic teenage into adult years, if he knew I was sad, thinking too much or existing on an ego island of my own, he would stand at my doorway and just drop his trousers to his boxers and stand there with a dumb look on his face until I laughed. When people spoke to him from their misguided psyche or they prattled on about a subject he correctly deemed utter nonsense, he would stare straight at them and either blink his eyes repeatedly and hard and say nothing or just promptly fall asleep. Heyoka is a Lakota Native American concept akin to the fool, a sacred clown whose purpose was to ride the horse backwards, wear the clothes inside out, play with gender roles and do anything to shift a person or a tribe’s momentary myth.
With Alexander McQueen’s death we lose a Heyoka and a Modern Mythmaker. This one, for us, was unafraid to pierce reality and offer the Mirror and the Power to Play all Roles, both human and beyond. For himself, unfortunately, this gift ran out. No other fashion designer comes close to this blatant offering, except perhaps Martin Margiela, a nihlist to McQueen’s effusion. The guantlet has been laid down…McQueen is beyond The Masters, beyond Chanel, beyond YSL, beyond.
In the end humor is always the best armor and amour.
To explore the armour of our perceptions and psyche and give us new skin is the role of the Heyoka,the Fool. Rituals of art, architecture or design can be initiations to pierce, puncture, to move the constructs of skin and the labyrinth of the individual psyche into the collective. For me, the heyokas of the heart are everywhere. With my own father’s recent death and McQueen’s suicide, seemingly influenced in part due to the death of his mother, a dive into the roots of creativity, healing and humor revealed the magic of the Sacred Clown, the humor of the Universe and the cycles of Spring. As we keep softening to the possibilities of our experience offering all kinds of Avatars of Amour in our midst, everything from spontaneous kindness, the painful suicide of a master or for me lately, even looking again and again at images of inspiring shifting forms such as the architecture of Herzog & de Meuron. The trousers are dropped and life is staring at us waiting for us to Feel The Love.
Although these Heyoka Ariadnes are deft with aiding us conquering demons, like the Minotaur, by leading us out of puzzles with simple things like brilliant paradox, rare beauty, a new fierce pair of boots changing the way we walk and understand our place on the earth, joking or balls of red thread, there is no total immunity from the pains of life, as we are reminded by McQueen’s suicide and Ariadne’s story.
The mythical Ariadne is abandoned on an island by her lover after helping him out of the labyrinth…
Her name is traced to its Minoan roots is “All Holy One” from the Greek and the Cretan-Greek form for arihagne, “Utterly Pure” and the word “àgni”, in turn which goes back in time translated as “Holy Pure Fire” in Sanskrit. Agni is one of the most important of the Vedic gods, as the god of fire and the acceptor of sacrifices. He is ever-young and immortal because his fire is re-lit every day. Ariadne is already a Heyoka because she is based on the primal idea of a man’s energy even while being in the throes of playing the part of a very emotional woman who only wants to retreat to her cave due to being abandoned by her lover.
She is also the goddess of snakes and vegetation and lest her emotions drown her dreams as in this floating bed by artist Vincent Olinet, it takes a dream of Bacchus and a Spring-like re-awakening of pleasure and heat to remind her that her name is fire and that where there is loss, pleasure must arise again. This Heyoka’s fire could also be the serpent-like spiraling life and fire force of kundalini.
Bacchus, the God of Wine and Revelry, whose name means also means “To Shout”, appears to her in a dream and tells her to remain on the island because he was coming to marry her even as her lover Theseus, whose name means “To Set, to Order or to Dispose,” deserted her.
Ariadne auf Naxos, Richard Strauss’s opera within an opera, conveys the myth’s mirror image of pain and joy perfectly. The opera takes place in a rich man’s house where due to constraints of time, a drama must be performed at the same time as a comedy. The height of an aria which melts armoured skin is crowned by a rolling in of the comedy troupe…thus the tale of abandonment is always played along the receiving of the new. The union of Ariadne and Bacchus is said to be the constellation Corona Borealis, a half-circle of stars, a celestial crown made by the supreme goldsmith, Hephaestus, at his abode underwater, suggesting the depth of this emotional rescue.
Just as the Opera’s many windowed stage set by Frank Gehry heightens the theme of humans ultimately playing all roles, the Prima Donna and the burlesque dancer, the Composer and the Patron, the Nymphs and the Clowns, the Opera has its own ways of playing with convention. The charactor of the Composer in Ariadne auf Naxos embodies the opera’s own Heyoka invention of the “trouser role”, a young man’s role played by a woman or a “skirt role,” where a man often plays an older woman. Traced to its beginnings, it was always a novelty first to spark ticket sales and a musical choice second.
“Principally, the Heyókȟa functions both as a mirror and a teacher, using extreme behaviors to mirror others, thereby forcing them to examine their own doubts, fears, hatreds, and weaknesses. Heyókȟas also have the power to heal emotional pain; such power comes from the experience of shame–they sing of shameful events in their lives, beg for food, and live as clowns. They provoke laughter in distressing situations of despair and provoke fear and chaos when people feel complacent and overly secure, to keep them from taking themselves too seriously or believing they are more powerful than they are.”—John Fire Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions
A famous line at the end of Ariadne auf Naxos is meant to convey the whim of the heart of a woman, yet it can easily speak to our never ending desires and quest for sensation. It is perhaps this relentless desire that is either our undoing or our salvation, depending upon your mood, religious proclivities or chemicals in your brain.
“With each new god, I surrendered without a word!”
1111 Lincoln Road by Paul Clemence
Alexander McQueen is quoted, “From heaven to hell and back again, life is a funny thing. Beauty can come from the most strangest of places even the most disgusting places.” It takes an open heart and brave eyes to consistently present ugliness to us and have it transform into beauty. What we loved about this man was his magic to do this with mere clothing and somehow in the process transform our vision of our souls as humans.
Buildings, like clothing, can be mythical in their playfulness of forms and perform their role as sacred clowns. Much like the stark white Gehry stage waiting to be animated by charactors or even Margiela’s all white store, few things are as soulless and hollow as a parking garage. My new heroes, Herzog & de Meuron unviel 1111 Lincoln Road, a shopping and residential epiphany at the end of the famous shopping street, as a crowning touch of Heyoka structure and symbol of empty consumerism and auto culture, laid bare for pause amidst the 24 hour party that is Miami.
What once was a symbol of ghostliness is open and now inviting, guileless, without armor or protection, an exaltation of “non structure.” I imagine the new luxury and sensation, Post McQueen, will be more of this type of space. Like a cave or a meditation, our experience in spaces like this are allowed to roam more and be a vital part of the invention and living character. A Slow Luxury.
Where current fashion trends and logos are an armor that previously proclaimed a tribal identity, at this point in our expression, they are meaningless for protection or belonging to anything but a mindless buying club. Artist, Tetsuya Noguchi and designer, Margiela capture this sacred clown taunt perfectly with Heyokas in the gallery and on the runway, encouraging new paths. Who will be crowned the New McQueen?
Hiroko Masuike for the New York Times
So we have lost a God with McQueen’s death. With loss is a withdrawal and a re-orientation. Where to place and express our desires post-recession, post-consumer culture myth and post McQueen to build a new Spring-like, Bacchus-rockin, Earth-lovin Heart amidst so much collective sleeping, despair and so much destruction of our biology and systems? Transparency of our emotions and experience with each other is key. It is the Bacchus coming to rescue us. Herewith, a modern Bacchus and Ariadne offering, places playing with us and pushing us into reinvention and renewal.
A Drunken Bacchus Champagne Toast in a Glass Slipper To A Drunken Building With Much Sense.
One Jackson Square. New York City.
Like Margiela’s or Cinderella’s glass slipper, desire and danger, two primal experiences of emotional loss of control, are mixed for the sense overload that catapults us into “hyper-reality,” a term a friend used to accurately describe where we go in our psyche when someone close to us dies or we lose what we love most. Between the impact of the deaths of Isabella Blow and his mother, our idea of the public McQueen perhaps could not exist or create in that fragile bubble of pain, transparency, truth and endure the rigors of the identity shift space for himself, as much as he invited it for the rest of the world.
Where there is passionate emotion and life force in every fiber of McQueen, there is distance and transparency in Margiela, so I often thought of them as two sides of coin. Margiela’s clothes are purposely zen and soul-less. I recently attended the launch of never-worn Margiela collected by private collector, Marcia Berger with a party put on by Michael Bruno’s 1stdibs.com, the elegantly lushest collection of objets online. (including astute couture curating and commentary by Clair Watson and Adriana Caras.) The party was held in three suites designed with 1stdibs goods at One Jackson Square, the new, very soulful and stunning green building of “ribbons of woven glass in the wind” topped by lush gardens and designed by William Pedersen of Kohn Pedersen Fox. Cocoons of glass, uneven curvy spaces dis-orienting and yet so solid. Bascially as beautiful inside as out…transparent, enlightened. A Good Drunk.
A building of woven glass ribbons in the wind is as drunk sensibly as a pair of McQueen’s shoes. McQueen was an accomplished scuba enthusiast, and it influenced his 2000 Leagues Under The Sea collection, a passion shared by James Cameron who was influenced by undersea life for much of Avatar’s imagery. If water is pure emotion, it is a symbol that we are diving deep into the Earth’s emotion, beauty and the power it holds for us as popular culture to share this cathartic collective dream.
and now…A New Island Cave For Ariadne.
After my own father died in December, I spent many wintry hours in the 65 cafe of the new Alice Tully Hall, where the experience offered both sensation and space, like being in a cave that is completely transparent. Like the open mouth of a shark emerging from the depths, the shape is funny and jarring yet inside is all about safe and nestled with a view point not often experienced in the city. I also spent time at the ballet this winter and this piercing quality was echoed in the classic Sleeping Beauty story, another story of loss, love, a woman in retreat and despair but dreaming and hearing of Spring and New Love while she slept. Ariadne would like this cave. I often think if we can just tap into the stage where we are moment to moment of the natural cycle from death and dust to seed to germination to sprout to shoot to plant to flower to death to dust… it is a savior from our linear despair. The best spaces operate as sacred clowns offering both angles and curves to jostle us with humor and grace.
How Ariadne and Bacchus Meet and Engender Stars.
How essential on an emotional level is this integration of biology in our psyche even in our cities. For me it is the arrival of Bacchus. I call it “wild-cycling” expressed in the other notable project by Alice Tully Hall’s designers, Diller, Scofidio + Renfro, The Highline. This green space moved abandonment into community and created a stage set for a tight-rope sacred space for balancing and also, like Alice Tully Hall, offering a mid level ribbon weaving through buildings, a brand new urban viewpoint. The soothing “non architecture” or the integration of the wild into urban through re-purposed railway tracks is like weaving and welcoming back a new lover, that of nature, a place to pause from concrete and breathe biology back into every fiber of our lives. Our demand for this soft process from communal emotional support to pure foods to sacred secular experiences is absolutely the New Luxury.
My other favorite, Jardins du Ruisseau, a surprise on the way to the Marches aux Puces in Paris at Porte de Clignancort, is one of the best hidden gardens of Paris. A long stretch of a former rail line, it’s presence is even more compelling than the Highline for its random completeness, true spontaneous birth and cultivation by neighbors who live in along side cultivating their food, vineyards and flowers, instead of being a design of city planners and architects.
…and so this is the awakening of Ariadne, sleeping in the depths of the earth and woken by the arrival of Bacchus and new wines to be intoxicated by. The natural counterpoint to one of McQueen’s last statements, his impossible, celestial, alien glittery, only-for-those-who-have-their-sea-legs shoe boots are Margiela’s classic statement, his grounded cloven Pan boots, a kind of earthen shoe good for another 1000 years of evolution. Come back to Earth fantasy.
“When a vision comes from the thunder beings of the West, it comes with terror like a thunder storm; but when the storm of vision has passed, the world is greener and happier; for wherever the truth of vision comes upon the world, it is like a rain. The world, you see, is happier after the terror of the storm… you have noticed that truth comes into this world with two faces. One is sad with suffering…”
…and the other laughs; but it is the same face, laughing or weeping… as lightning illuminates the dark, for it is the power of lightning that heyokas have.” Black Elk, quoted in Neihardt (1959)
Yinka Shonibare Aliens
Wild-cycling as a new luxury can help insure we are not carrying earth just as a nostalgic memory through culturally patterned cloths to decorate our life-support armor as we are forced explore new worlds. Instead, as smartly armored Avatars, we can carry integral seeds of our emotional and sensory emphatic experience here on Earth, with each other and the living breathing fiber of organic earth. We stand the luxury of enjoying life through the precious gift of our own pure bodies and moment to moment Heyoka Guruship vs. manufactured Hallmark moments selling a Paradise that has been paved over into a parking lot.
After my father’s death, the reuccurring image for me was a roadside sight I saw years ago from inside our passing car, that of a dead tree struck by lightening alone in a field surrounded a lush green grove of trees. When I was able to suddenly shift to seeing the tree from the perspective of the grove, I knew I was perched at the edge of the cave, after a long sleep, opening my eyes as the sun rose for a new morning.
Goodnight Sweet Prince.
Thank you for Your Dreams.
“We have trusted and we have been betrayed, and when the the protesting and the howling has ceased, we have followed that wound through the labyrinth, and it has taken us to the very bottom. And the bottom falls away, and the never-ending beginning lies in the palm of our hand.” Rick Jarow
written by Jade Dressler
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Filed under: ARCHITECTURE, ART, FASHION, FLOWERS, NEW GREEN, NEW YORK, STYLE, TRENDS | 10 Comments
Tags: 1st dibs, Alexander McQueen, Alice Tully Hall, ariadne and bacchus, ariadne and theseus, ariadne auf naxos, armor clothing, bacchus, buddhist, carravagio, chanel, Chanel logo, clothing as armor, coco chanel, Corona Borealis, death of a close one, diller scofidio+renfro, Frank Gehry stage set, glass slipper, God of Wine, Herzog de Meuron, herzong and de meuron, Heyoka, hidden gardens of paris, highline, Hiroko Masuike, jade dressler, jardins de ruisseau, JOhn Fire Lame Deer, Kohn Pederson Fox, kundalini, lightening, Marcia Berger, Margiela glass slipper, margiela tabi boots, martin margiela, McQueen quote, McQueens suicide, Michael Bruno, new luxury, new york city parks, nyc urban gardens, One Jackson square, pan, paris urban gardens, Paul Clemence, post McQueen, rails into gardens, rails to trails, Richard Strauss, Rick Jarow, sacred clown, Sleeping Beauty, Spring renewal, Spring wine, Tetsuya Noguchi, The Fool, the highline, the new luxury, trouser role, urban farming, urban gardens, urban railway lines, Vincent Olinet, why did mcqueen commit suicide, wild cycling, wild into urban, William Pedersson, Yinka Shonibare, YSL, zen
Gimme Love! Gimme 11 Red V-Day Presents! I will serve faithfully the lover who treats me (and us) to this menu of 11 red perfections I desire for V-Day or anyday.
Come alive St. Valentine! I always confuse you with the Earl of Sandwich so I had to look up your story.
Just another saint put to death by Roman Empire’s Claudius ll by stoning? No one really knows why he inspires such love festing. Like our nameless lusting,hurts, fears, desires and awe over Love, the source will always be a mystery. St. Valentine doesn’t even have a Hallmarkable Avatar the way St.Nick has Santa Claus and St.Patrick has his green leprechaun. OK maybe we made Cupid his Avatar and Psyche his holy grail to rescue from the Underground. St. Valentine himself did leave us his skull crowned with flowers.
No wonder we throw ourselves into gifting and loving on this day! We want our own love story, we want much more than mandible-less skull relics peeping through the portholes of Time! It’s been cold outside and we want some hot lovin’!
A search for the pagan roots sometimes helps with hot lovin’ inspiration, our unfathomable mythical connections and general bookishness. Here’s a Wikipedia gem, apparently Valentine’s Day is based on the pagan holiday Lupercalia, and one can find references to Spring cleaning and new life ala the wolf Lupa who suckled the infant twins Romulus and Remus…but this! “At this time many of the noble youths and magistrates run up and down through the city naked, for sport and laughter striking those they meet with shaggy thongs.” Lashes from these animal skin whips were to said to increase fertility.
That is a Caligula-worthy porn movie or music video begging to be made. Here are 11 steps to real red things I prefer my lover to give me:
Step 1. the gift. lash blinkings and sexy trinkets.
Bat your boy eyelashes sweetly at me, brush my hair and adorn me with jewels. Betony Vernon jewels, please.
Her roots may be dirty blond and she may be a coalminer’s daughter, but the sex-full and simultaneously purposeful jewelry of Betony Vernon beckons more than gold, sporting real bedhead or the 17 year old thrill of wearing the football star’s hickeys. And she herself brilliantly mixes a soft 40’s minx look with an Appalachian porn vibe, melikes it, quite stunning.
Step 2…red wine, red velvet, red monkeys
Let’s soak in a robust Red and gurgle beneath the fez’d monkey at New York City’s The Jane Hotel bar.
Did they open the big room yet? Can we slip the bartender a crisp $1000. and play inside?
Step 3. gift me your mind…wine tipsy, fluttery red art repartee
Have you seen the art shanties they make in Minneapolis’ Medicine Lake?
no! but look at this old, esoteric, really red media cover, isn’t it the best new media you’ve seen lately?
um, is it a fallen angel Avatar for a multi-platformed, multi-channeled whatever?
well no. It’s just old. which somehow feels fresher. captivating…creation of Fleur Cowles…born unremarkable made herself into an icon and became friends with Presidents, Ctzars and Parlimentary Persons of every ilk. She published Flair for a year and lived it her whole life.
This picture may or may not be her but it comes up in a google search and damn…a red hat at the pool?
Step 4…hungry. Vlada. Russian Samovar.
Why? Why? New York History Baby. Russian Passion. Russian vodka. It’s the haunt of Carrie Bradshaw (“It’s very…red” she observed.) and the former creation of Jilly, Sinatra’s bodyguard who welcomed the Rat Pack to it’s cushy red banquets… owned by our new friend, the bold, the blond Vlada and ballet boy Mikhail Baryshnikov.
Step 5. baby, can you feel my red shoes under the table?
these exact Christian Louboutin shoes, that you are ***f e e l i n g*** right now are in a lineage of men memories fueled from red leather me-wrinkled ankle boots at 6 on a swing with my Dad to my red peep toe Charles Jourdans in the eighties when we first met in the club that was a church, you grabbed me to Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” and we did until “Take Me Home”…I love that you are the man who buys my shoes, protects my feet and unabashedly buys my heart.
Step 6. prodigal son and the siren. ballet.
our shoes journey syncopated steps making diagonal leagues in the icy February air across Lincoln Center’s vast plain towards the ballet. I am gasping over Diaghilev’s siren in Prodigal Sun…this red and white deco sketch, this is a Superheroine, a visionary anime from the 1920’s. The ghoulish crew, the melodrama and the Balanchine timeless modern force gets you. the lovers’ body puzzles! when she wraps herself in the endless infinite red scarf! the leathered, tethered and pleading son’s slide down the Father’s body…whoa.
Step 7. after ballet dessert cool down with pichet at spot.
My sweet friend Pichet Ong p’onged from The Spice Market to P’ong to Spot. talk to the tart. the yuzu Oreo-crusted ice cream sandwich and with macerated strawberries, passionfruit foam and crumbly chocolate soil has us in Marilyn Minter sugar overdoes overdose.
Step 8. at your sacred feet. gimme men’s feet, expensive shoes, no socks.
my X-ray specs mind-spy and feel your ankles and see my just desserts. (blogger note: there are no photos of sexy men’s feet online…do even gay men ignore the feet?)
Step 9. seduction finale. love chamber essentials, bring these please:
swagger, stagger, protect, expose, circle, unwind, grasp, conquer, surrender, shake, shore up, possess, release, smile, eyes close, surprise.
here am I deep like earth eyes, to protect, to feed the twins you are, all of it there’s more than all of it here. enough chair, red cloth, milk, space, poetry.
hindu hop skotch. the red is for Shakti Female and the white is for Shiva Male and Pink is the…Pleasure. gotcha Volupta, child of Cupid and Psyche. I am feeling your Holy Name of Bliss:-)))))))
Step 10. thankfully, you know exactly my bathroom essentials…
dry brush, scrubs, scented oils, white marble, gigantic proportions, big mirrors, fresh flowers, art, huge white linen bedsheets or towels…I love when things get used for something other than what God intended.
Step 11. and I will soothe your morning with my hangover cure. just promise me you will bring me your hunger…always.
it may be manhattan, but the mourning dove is sweeting us from sleep, let me sweet you with some coconut kefir to sooth the hangover, open that lovely mouth for some buttery biscuits while listening to sweet Telepopmusik to send you on your way…into another day…
Lyrics to Breathe :
I brought you some something close to me
And left with something new
I can see through your head
You haunt my dreams
But theres nothing to do but believe
Just believe
Just breathe
Another day
Just believe
Another day
Just breathe
Another day
Just believe
Another day
Just breathe
I’m used to it by now
Another day
Just believe
Just breathe
Just believe
Just breathe
Lying in my bed
Staring at the ceiling
Just breathe
Another day
Another day
Just believe
Another day
I’m used to it by now
I’m used to it by now
Just breathe
Just believe
Just breathe
Just believe
Just breathe
Just believe
Just believe
Just breathe
Just believe
Another day
Just believe
Another day
Just believe
Another day
Just breathe
Another day
Just breathe
I do believe
Another day
Another day
Another day
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Filed under: ART, LIVES, LOVE, LOVERS, THE TOP 11 | 2 Comments
Tags: art lovers, art shanties, Balanchine, ballet lovers, bathroom decor ideas, Betony Vernon, coco chanel, Cupid, cupid and psyche, dessert in NYC, Diaghilev, Eggleson, Famous Lovers, flair magazine, Fleur Cowles, French lovers, hangover cures, images of lovers, jade dressler, Jilly, just breathe, LOVERS, lovers images, lovers in nyc, lovers photos, Lupercalia, Marilyn Minter, medicine lake, Pichet Ong, prodigal son and siren, prodigal son ballet, Rat pack, red lovers, red perfections, red shoes, russian samovar, russian smaovar, sexy men's feet, Shiva Yantra, shri yantra, Spot, Spot desserts, telepopmusik, The Jane Hotel, timeless lovers, Valentine's Day lovers, valentine's day presents, Vanessa Beecroft, vlada
ELEVEN Lucid Diamonds in The Rough Voluptuous Sky.
Tell Persephone, for a good time don’t call my Iphone, silence in the cave and underground realms is woo’ing me with diamonds now. And if you are a Party or Person calling…this better be GOOD.
The cave of deep dark cold, the long night, the winter solstice is coming. For direction, desire and comfort…the voluptuous night sky. For knowing…the deep quiet inside. For events…transforming only please.
Diamonds in the Rough from inky black coal are Stars in my Sky and here are 11 of them ranging from “under-privileged kids” to Pop Stars such as Damien Hirst and Karl Lagerfeld. Go below, go under and go into and get into it to find treasures where most don’t look.
ONE. THE MEEK SHALL INHERIT THE EARTH. NEWARK, NEW JERSEY.
Picture this. I had a cold. It was an unseasonably cold night in October. I had commitments. To Kids. To Art. To an Evening out in NYC for Causes + Fundraising, I had to accept my fuzzy brain and altered perception of Body, enter the magical forest glens of Midtown Tourists and West of Eighth Avenue Hinterlands and Rock on.
And so…to Rockefeller Center, our first stop for a cocktail party to benefit the Links School in Newark, held in a verdant cave of palms against the night sky of deep dark blue and cool steel.
My partner Michelle Barge and I met up at the invite of Ellen Cohen of Lazard Freres and her beloved cause, The Link School, which serves low income urban students from Newark with exceptional and rigorous education. The result is students who excel with an 80% college enrollment. This year resulted in an astounding 2 million dollars in scholarship funding. Kudos to the Principal, Maria Pilar Paradiso J.D., who was positively inspiring and supporter, Veronika Sonsev of Jumptap, the mobile advertising agency, with whom I shared lively conversation about the arts, education and the digital frontier.
I was born in Newark and care passionately about this city rising from the ashes of racism and poverty to be a center of the Arts and Industry. Thank you Mayor Cory Booker (and our friend Desiree Peterkin Bell) Ashton Kutcher, Forest Whitaker and Conan O’Brien…public faces waking up America to the potential versus the hopelessness in our inner cities. I proudly step away from my red Camaro in my Uggs and push back my feathered bangs and salute you. I am actually a proud Jersey girl. (I mean, Newark girl…ouch!…not ALL of NJ!)
TWO. “HIGHBROW” AND LOWBROW…ALWAYS THE TWAIN SHALL MEET.
The next stop that night, WAY on the other side of town, almost in the River to an unmarked warehouse loft, the site for the Pointe Suite Art Ball Studio 450 Penthouse. A place where no one in their right mind should sojourn. Whizzing cars entering the Lincoln Tunnel make it feel as though one was in New Jersey already, a frightening prospect for NY’ers. “This better be good, “ I thought. Annika Conner, artist and social butterfly and my friend, artist Nick Papadakis were raising funds to create a book of new artists and for the trek, I wanted excitement.
The wintery and tree girl paintings at the top of this post are by Nick. I showed his work many years ago when I ran the MUD party at Baktun in the Meatpacking when it still was an actual Meatpacking place and parties there were shining because of the contrast. We are talking The Cooler, Baktun and Florent. It was magic. Looming buildings, dark streets and unmarked doors when you arrived at about 12 am along with that pervasive smell of meat. At 4 am, tumbling out into 14th street to the roar of tractor trailers, white clad meat men and slivers of glimpses at the swinging cow carcasses in the coolers. Imagine us at 4 am, silhouetted figures against truck headlights, Manolo and liquor challenged, with our diagonal, cobble stoned treks home past steaming street vents with drum and bass still pumping in our blood as meat workers arrived for a day’s work. This was visceral Art without price tags, entitlement and the crowds.
If an art event is going to sparkle diamonds in NYC it better have some feel like this…no matter how highbrow the rollers.
Once inside the warehouse, I searched the crowd vainly for something to turn me on. Annika and her father’s regalia unfortunately were the highlight I enjoyed, mostly because they reminded me of artist Richard Saja’s embroidered toile (above)… without the irony though.
Here are Annick’s paintings.
I love the saturated colors. As a contrast, here is a painting of me done by Florian Heinke from a photo taken at APT, another old favorite place in the Meatpacking.
I have read that Annick loves dancing, and although there was none at her party, we seem to share this.
Nick’s work is now sold at Sotheby’s. I was nostalgic and touched to hear how he has moved from nightclub party exhibitions to the world’s stage. I guess dancing does indeed lead to other things.
Our photographer, Kaitlyn Barlow and I wished the artists to be featured in the book were more prominent at this event, even the slide show was tucked away in a corner. Beside a hilarious drunken girl with dress and shoes falling off, who was running around sketching everyone, you had to search for the art or to feel immersed in creativity. Without an immersive experience of art, music, film, atmosphere,the whole party was not as exciting as it could be, as most charity balls tend to be. Kudos to Annick and Nick, I admire your art and efforts, but this party made me want to hustle my heels home…vaguely unsatisfied.
Sometimes, the lucidity comes in knowing when to get to the leaving.
(See further in the post for a truly stellar “Art” party, Performa’s Opening Party.)
THREE. HOW TO CIRCLE FROM HYPER NATION TO HIBER NATION.
Sanskrit language tutorial. OM begets HOME. OM begets WOMB. OM begets ROOM. A room with no view is an instant high. Home is where the heels kick off into the sculptural pile of clothes shed and skin and gratefulness spin a cocoon via a linen down comforter.
How planned it would be to cuddle first in this tufted leather over metal cocoon for the Night’s Requiem before the bed?
Blackman Cruz is the pointed collection of stellar furniture to behold Life and Drama in. Blackman Cruz stores are in LA or SF. This Tufted Pod Chair requires $20,500. in exchange for plenty of Good Dreams.
FOUR. VISIT YOUR DARK LADY.
Remedios Varos is the artist for pod chairs.
FIVE. FIND PERSONALITY BEGINS WHERE COMPARISON ENDS.
…and then there is I Pod hair. Dusty Springfield, The Woodabe and the artist JillZ, aka Moi;-)
The artist relates: “After reading recently again the biography of David Geffen I tuned the Pandora to Laura Nyro radio and was transported by other pop icons of the 60’s and 70’s such as Dusty Springfield and even Carole King and became a bit obsessed by their guru-like words and untouchable, mysterious goddess status and personalities. When I saw this photo of Dusty above, it really hit me and I suddenly wondered what she was thinking and feeling in that puffy beehive during this photo shoot. The only way I could really know was to try to assume her un-natural pose and quixotic smile so I started playing around in Photobooth.”
“The result is a series of images, stepping stones towards a vision of mash-up, old formal portraits which I have been desiring to do for a very long time but in such a way to be completely timeless, genderless and culturally undefined.”
“The root of that desire is my obsession with any transformative ritual. The Fulani tribesmen of the Woodabe from Africa shown here with their exaggerated expressions and full-on preening line-ups like showgirls is so opposite our culture’s man-dance of solitary ego parading. I always wondered how they felt too. So I went there too and decided to become their Luv-Child.”
“Perhaps contrasted with Dusty’s cool, stiff and almost transsexual vibe, the window between these two worlds beckoned me in and the plan is to bring more people and personalities with me. We have just begun the mining process for these diamonds.”
(You can see what gets churned up from pod-chair dreaming and cold nights between parties.)
SIX. PRACTICE DARK ARTS.
From the entrance, with its giant big blue inflatable lightbulb with evil eyes and scars signaling brilliant ideas ahead, to the intricate charted details of Martian and ghoul anatomy, Burton’s vision is our modern antidote to everything Dark and Fearful. With one eyeball set on Western culture, following Edward Gorey’s mock Victorian and the other eyeball on Eastern culture’s best 1960’s monster and Argonaut movies and futuristic anime, the man has created a compound eye based on a childhood touchpoint of enjoying being “misfit” vs. “normal” and seeing the world from inside his head.
I desired the corpse bride’s popping eyeballs to see over the crowds oogling precious drawings of my favorites, Stain Boy, Mr. Oogie Boogie, with his independently moving bulges in his cushy body and Large Marge. Burton’s renderings of ourselves and the people we know with their innards flailing about in a way that we realize we truly perceive them. An early film he made of himself sleeping and dreaming in his bed with upside down nerd glasses says it all.
Thank you to my friend Rajendra Roy, The Celeste Bartos Chief Curator of Film, one of the organizers of the exhibition. My favorite memory of Raj is his glow-in-the-Dark, very Burtonesque and hilarious mad ghost dancing on the beach in a sheet at our Halloween bonfire during the Hamptons Film Festival. Big hugs to Monique Baron, my friend just moving from Corporate to Creative, for suggesting we go to the exhibit.
The Tim Burton exhibition is at New York’s Museum of Modern Art until late April.
SEVEN. A BRILLIANT SKULL ONLY NEEDS SISYPHUS’ PAINTBRUSH.
Damien, we hardly know ye.
“No Love Lost, Blue Paintings,” the Damien Hirst painting exhibition, opened this month in London at the Wallace Collection to disparaging criticism. I actually love the paintings and it made for a Hirst womb coupled with my visit to Other Criteria, Damien Hirst’s underground gallery at the Gagosian uptown store, which opened in September in New York City, with the perfect companion, Shelley Lewis, an elegant, humorous and smart Brit with a Bohemian spirit.
A brilliant white cave with wallpaper of pills, butterflies and flowers proffered up the tidy output of the Artist for Conceptual Consumption. Close ups of the solid multi-colored dots surrounded by field of gold glitter revealed a precision and perfection around simplicity that is as meditative as a Rothko or a mandala.
The paintings feel like a pared down schematic of the momentary void from which Hirst’s lit symbolic tools, such as his skull, flowers, thought lines, dots and shark jaws, converge for a moment. Less solid and a childlike effort begging for the technique and critique to be dropped, I truly admire these for their rawness and almost naivite.
The Guru is painting for fun.
EIGHT. MEN IN BLACK.
Karl Lagerfeld is the one who said, “Personality begins where comparison ends.”
Compare and Contrast are THE jumping off points, for new ideas, humor, conveying a seductive advertising message and even to the stark black and white uniform Western culture adopts to award and celebrate.
Both were shining last week for the Ad Council’s annual black tie event at the Waldorf Astoria. I was struck how the sea of men in the rigor and elegance of black tie dress always levels the comparison factor for males (much like the Fulani line-up) and allows the personality of the men shine on top of a white arrow in a black field through their faces, hands, shoes and characters.
Similarly, The Ad Council uses contrast and the improbable to convey messages from the American Heart Association’s “hands can do incredible things” for Hands-only CPR to brilliant pieces on Gay rights. Where would we be without these creative minds devoting time, energy and money to creatively pushing the needle of compassion and engagement for the masses?
Huffington Post has many of this year’s commercials here.
And Kudos to Karl for re-inventing the language of black and white uniforms via Chanel and his own wardrobe as a frame for personality read from the articulation of details. The signs and symbols sensed like animals.
NINE. PERFORMA. NOW THIS IS AN ART EVENT.
Attuned to digital experience and expectations, almost in a sexual way, public events must equally touch the primal and the disorienting to engage us. We are now the impulsed creators of our immediate experience in front of our Ipods and computers…so to replicate this seduction face to face, nothing about our surroundings must be less than peak experience.
Imagine exploring vast spaces with freshly uprooted apple trees saying “Pick me”, a sea of glasses inviting you to “Drink me”, a table of 2000 pounds of pork ribs rained upon by honey ooze dripping from the ceiling saying “This is messy”and Jeff Koons chocolate bunnies with hammers saying “Break me off”… with all of it based on the book of Genesis? Now you are talking an event worth braving the cold for!
Performa, the bienniel roster of performance artists from around the world opened recently in New York City with an Opening Night Dinner Benefit at X Initiative, designed by Jennifer Rubell, the daughter of art collectors and niece of Studio 54 impresario Steve Rubell.
This event raised the bar…thankfully. (still getting honey outa my dress)
TEN. SOUND IN THE DARK BEGINS THE WORLD.
Pomp and circumstance reigns at the Park Avenue Armory from its historic army days to “PA” a performance by resident Marian Rosenfeld, one of the closing events of Performa 09.
While waiting to be let into the Armory’s drill hall where the performance was to be, I and others explored the dark rooms filled with taxidermy, including owls, a bobcat, a moose and others, among intricate black wrought iron chandeliers and military portraits. The rooms are begging for a fashion shoot (especially given the Armory’s rep as hosting the “Silk Stocking Regiment”) The heavy, ornate rooms were surprisingly designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany along with Stanford White (whose story of young mistresses and murder is intriguing New York history.) The rooms are intricate example of the American aesthetic movement’s use of exotic materials in lush combinations, a cult of beauty and sensuousness that is considered to have been pronounced dead upon the trial of Oscar Wilde in 1895.
The Veteran’s room’s chocolate brown wood carved ceiling with silver inlaid arabesques made me gasp. In the library, the silver work on urns, commemorative plates and ephemera mixed ornate animal forms and horns with heraldry is salivating and desires an indie model’s hand on them. Gold stenciled, Indian block-print inspired flowers on blue wallpaper and ceiling made me think of Hirst’s flower wallpaper, can you imagine that being commissioned today for an army headquarters?
The incongruity continued as we poured into the cavernous dark of the drill hall punctuated only with a few spots of light on PA speakers or a cellist and the monstrous scaffold ceiling. Machinery and recording bits lay all around. Following first a female voice’s personal love cooing coming out of the big PA speakers turning around and around in a vast searchlight way made me feel Nazi-Germanish. Tick tock tick tock, the crowd became attuned to the utterances of The Machine. Another spot is lit where a cello player plays with electronic feedback and the crowd drifts there. Lights or sudden switches took people to one tableau or another or just sitting in the middle of nowhere to soak it all in. Once the soundscape became more and more of the same thing, it made me wonder about the tone of pure love emanating from within and without, like the sound of OM or the universe existing whether we tune in or not…and how we are subject to sound’s pull and push.
The crowd’s long applause at the end was most thrilling, due to it’s shared staccato and crowdsourced birth. Another surprising and life-shifting night in New York City.
The following image, Bejing’s National Stadium by architects Herzog and de Mueron, just came into my life because of a potential client’s new space in their upcoming project in Miami. It is the perfect modern aesthetic fusing sensuousness and contemplation and strangely conveys the same feeling of being in Marina Rosenfeld’s drill room pulsating with light and sound.
ELEVEN. STARCHILD…This better be GOOD.
I’ve been doing yoga since I was 16, a teenage starchild, flipping into headstands against my bedroom door where hung this Lisbon nightclub poster with groovy Hebrew writing advertising a nightclub called “Tiffany’s.” Today, while doing a headstand, (which is great for spilling out the stars in your head), I saw the poster on my wall where it now hangs today and thought about the images we have as lodestars in our lives.
This enigmatic black-pod-hatted man will always intrigue me on to keep believing in that black field of all possibility so I remember to cultivate the stars in myself and others to pop the moment.
Here are Jamiroquai’s lyrics to Starchild, an old song, but one that feels right for the time and coming cold. It is kind of Christian mythical but a good reminder that we all are actually the Starchild and we are capable of fully inhabiting and making good the black wholes filled with stars that we are…
I’ve never seen the sky so angry
Starchild
You’ve got to do something about these
Mind crimes
The shuffling feet and sad expressions
They don’t go, they don’t go
I thought you came down from heaven
To save souls
These angry men are into making
Bad seeds
The only thing we had they’re taking
Now love needs
Needs a little, needs a little
Five thousand million people
To spread joy, spread a little joy
I thought you came down from heaven to save us
I thought you came but you just don’t take us
Chorus:
Somewhere in the world tonight
There’s a fire blazing bright
Keeping warm the superman
Sent to us to save the land
Somewhere in the world today
A hungry one will kneel to pray
Wishing all the while to see
Starchild
I’ve seen the preachers on the TV
In white suits
With precious stones they’re studded into
Their boots
Can you take the money, can you take their money?
I don’t know who to believe
Is it them or you?
I thought you came down from heaven to save us
I thought you came but you just don’t take us
[Chorus]
Starchild
Got to see him now
When you gonna come, when you gonna come
You’ve got to save us from what we’ve begun
From what we’ve begun
So long coming down
Starchild
Chorus
Somewhere in the world tonight
In the world tonight
Somewhere in the world tonight
In the world tonight
You know that somewhere in the world tonight
There’s a superman
There’s a superman and he’s coming down to see you, baby
There’s a superman coming
There’s a superman coming
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Filed under: ART | Closed
Tags: American Aesthetic Movement, Annika Conner, APT, Aston Kutcher, Baktun, Bejing's National Stadium, Blackman Cruz, Blue Paintings, Celeste Bartos Chief of Film, Conan O'Brien, Cory Booker, Damien Hirst, Desiree Peterkin Bell, Dusty Springfield, Ellen Cohen, florent, Florian Heinke, Forest Whitaker, Fulani, Gagosian, Herzog and de Mueron, jade dressler, Jamiroquai, Jennifer Rubell, Jenny Rubell, Jersey girl, Jumptap, Kaitlyn Barlow, Karl Lagerfeld hands, Link School, Louis Comfort Tiffany, Maria Pilar Paradiso, Marina Rosenfeld, Meatpacking, Michelle Barge, Mr. Oogie Boogie, Newark, Newark Links School, Nick Papadakis, No Love Lost, old Meatpacking clubs, old Meatpacking parties, Other Criteria, PA Marina Rosenfeld, Park Avenue Armory, Performa, Performa 09, Performa Opening Night Dinner, Performa X Initiative, Point Suite Ball, Pointe Suite Art Ball, Rajendra Roy, Remedios Varos, Richard Saja, Rockefeller Center, Sanford White, Shelley Lewis, Silk Stocking Regiment, Stain Boy, Starchild, The Ad Council, The Cooler, The Link School, Tim Burton, Tim Burton exhibit, Veronika Sonsev, Woodabe
